House of Nutter Read online

  Christopher with his mother, Constance Nutter, who sometimes helped at the café.

  In the years before Neville Chamberlain’s radio declaration that the United Kingdom was, once again, at war with Germany, government ministries began making speculative calculations about how many civilians might die during a theoretical aerial attack on British cities. If Hitler launched an all-out raid, the Home Office estimated that the demand for coffins might become so great—20 million square feet of timber each month—that mass graves and the incineration of bodies might become necessary. Worst-case predictions foresaw the spread of typhoid fever, unchecked civil disorder, and so much material damage that the assessments were quietly withheld, perhaps to avoid inciting public panic. By late 1937, gas masks were being assembled at a rate of 150,000 units per week. Then, with Nazi movements looking increasingly ominous, planning began for precautionary evacuations that were intended to reduce the projected casualty toll. This scheme would scoop up schoolchildren, elderly and blind people, infirm and invalids, expectant mothers, and mothers with children under five years of age. Because it would lead them out of urban centers into the countryside, the evacuation plan was codenamed Operation Pied Piper—a curious choice given the fabled Pied Piper of Hamelin lures children away to their doom.

  On September 1, 1939, people mobilized as the operation began to play out. The first day of evacuations focused solely on schoolchildren, many of whom had name-and-address tags pinned to their coats that made them resemble luggage on the railway platforms. Overhead, as the trains shuddered off to safety, giant barrage balloons bobbed in the sky. On September 2 and 3 (the day Britain went to war), mothers with young children became a priority, and they crammed the carriages with their luggage and government-issued General Civilian Respirators. David Christopher Nutter, born on May 10, 1939, was less than four months old at the time. Family lore has Dolly joining the voluntary exodus of 1.47 million people, boarding a train bound for Scotland that was so overcrowded David had to be handed aboard through an open carriage window.

  But if Dolly did escape to Scotland, she also quickly returned. Perhaps, like the 80 percent of evacuated mothers who’d come home by Christmas, she was deceived by a protracted calm on the Western Front that soon became known, somewhat ironically, as the Phoney War.

  After the Phoney War, the Luftwaffe began the very real Blitz. As London began to burn in 1940, Christopher turned John’s Café over to his elderly parents and enlisted in the army for DOW—“duration of war.” He traveled to Bulford Camp on the Salisbury Plain to fill his first posting as Private Nutter in the Royal Army Service Corps. Dolly, back in London, faced falling bombs no matter where she stayed; both Edgware and Kilburn would be hit repeatedly by the Germans. So she rejoined the government’s evacuation scheme and fled with her son into the country again; this time they washed up in Fairbourne, a tiny village on the coast of Cardigan Bay, in North Wales.

  Fairbourne is an unusual place. Houses are small and exposed, like dice tipped from a tumbler onto a tabletop of green felt. Dense forest is girdled by dry stone walls of Welsh slate. Behind the village, hills begin a punishing climb toward the heights of Cadair Idris. Along the shore, beyond a miniature train that has chugged back and forth for more than a century, gulls populate a shingle beach, and a slither of sand plays hide-and-seek with the tide. The beach feeds into the mouth of the River Mawddach in a wide, changeable estuary that divides Fairbourne from the larger settlement of Barmouth, just to the north. Tennyson wrote part of “In Memoriam” in Barmouth (“Sweet after showers, ambrosial air…”), and, seen in a certain magic-hour light, the entire area looks something like a prelapsarian Eden.

  At least, that’s how David describes it, having spent his formative years there. “We lived in a boardinghouse, in a room right at the top,” he recalls. “When I was old enough, I’d go and ring the church bells on Sundays, because I was friends with the vicar’s daughter. And the stationmaster used to let me into the signal box to pull the huge levers that shunted the rails between Fairbourne and Barmouth. I loved the smell of steam trains.”

  What it meant to the urbane, twenty-four-year-old Dolly is more opaque. Although she was far from solitary in her new home—marked as a “Safe Area” by the military, Fairbourne had been flooded with evacuees—there would not have been much to occupy the time, and even less in the way of employment. It is not hard to imagine Dolly walking down the shingle beach as she wondered how she’d ended up in a place like this, and what with another child on the way.

  Thomas Albert Nutter: When he was conceived, Christopher was stationed just several hours northeast of Fairbourne, repairing army equipment in the workshops at Overton-on-Dee. When Tommy was born, Christopher was right there in the Barmouth maternity hospital, signing his second son’s birth certificate on April 17, 1943.

  The bedlam of wartime Wales, though, with its bell-jar isolation and suspension of familiar social rules, had been bizarre enough to roil some ambiguity around Tommy’s origin. Besides evacuees, Fairbourne and Barmouth saw many unfamiliar faces during the war: “a polyglot assembly,” as a local historian has described it, of Brits, Norwegians, Lithuanians, and “at least one Russian lady.” American GIs passed through the area, while Crete Camp in Barmouth was used by the Royal Marines. Polish Commandos billeted with residents, ran mysterious night maneuvers, and finished punishing training exercises by marching down the road singing “You Are My Sunshine.” In the town’s pavilion, they threw rowdy public dances and flirted with the local girls, who flirted back.

  When he was a teenager, David whispered an idea into Tommy’s ear that would prove intractable: What if their mother had paramours out there in the wild west of Wales?

  What if Christopher Nutter was not his biological father?

  This was pure hokum, one teenager goading another with a fantasy that diagnosed the differences between them as symptoms of illegitimacy. Still, Tommy seemed to run with it. “He liked the idea that his real father was an American GI,” David says. Tommy told the story to cousins, friends, and even Dolly herself—who, far from being scandalized by the insinuation of her wartime promiscuity, apparently found it compelling enough to share with several more people. “She told me the story,” recalls one family acquaintance, “but it was only a joke. Although, I don’t know. It might not have been a joke?”

  Tommy, Dolly, and David sunbathing together on the beach.

  * * *

  Just one month after Tommy voiced his first scream in Barmouth, Christopher left the home forces and headed for North Africa, where he would draw on his experience as an aircraft seating upholsterer to provide maintenance support for the 1st Airborne Division. Africa was “filthy, with flies everywhere,” he later complained, though he also refused a vaccination against typhus while he was there. Toward the end of the war, after the invasion of Normandy, he headed to Norway as a member of the British Liberation Army. Scandinavia, by contrast, was to him “beautiful, wonderful”—particularly the ski jumps.

  Christopher Nutter, with his perpetual grimace, was not a bad person. His main shortcoming was a lack of imagination: He knew what he knew and had only minimal interest in knowing anything more. With a few exceptions—science; the “Dome of Discovery” at the Festival of Britain, which seemed to intrigue him—horizons were there to be fortified, not expanded. Like many men of his generation, Christopher grabbed hold of easy prejudices and built a barrier of abrasive pessimism around himself. Black people were lesser people; the new South Asian migrants to Britain were a cause for alarm; and America (New York particularly) was “a hellhole,” even though he’d never been there and would never go. Why anyone might voluntarily seek out somewhere other than one’s own comfortable abode was beyond his understanding.

  Christopher was discharged from service on February 15, 1946. He immediately reinstalled his expanded family in the Edgware flat and Dolly back behind the tea urn. This wa
s the natural order of things, as he saw it: an obedient wife, pints at the pub, the occasional game of football. “Chris just went to work, made some money,” a relative recalls. “He didn’t expect anything else out of life.”

  What he expected of his sons was just as banal. When he went off to war he was following an example set by his own father, also Christopher, who’d fought in the Great War and Second Boer War before that. In other words, Christopher Jr. had taken the torch of traditional British masculinity and relayed it through to the 1950s with minimal disruption. And now his own sons were expected to start carrying. “He used to take me to the Edgware Football Club and Lord’s Cricket Ground,” David recalls. “I think he was trying to encourage that sort of thing. He always wanted me to get into boxing, too, so he bought me boxing gloves. But I didn’t like it.”

  David lasted four days in the British Boy Scouts; Tommy never pretended to try. Instead of communal sports, they both preferred big Hollywood spectacles, viewed for free because their parents had agreed to display Odeon advertisements in the café. They also liked to spend time with their mother, whom they’d call Dolly, sunbathing together on the back stairs by the apple trees and accompanying her to live performances (Ethel Merman, Marlene Dietrich) at the Golders Green Hippodrome. Dolly, the brothers soon decided, was “almost like a slave” to her husband. Though she never spoke to them openly about being dissatisfied, they sensed Christopher got under her skin with his endless grousing—that he was, in effect, holding her back from reaching her full potential.

  As payback for the tyrannical atmosphere Christopher created at home, Tommy and David liked to play pranks on their father. One involved positioning an object atop a slightly open door: when their father pushed into the room carrying several plates of food, the object fell on his head, causing him to drop everything. Christopher was incensed; their arguments could be explosive. But the brothers were unperturbed and vowed to do it all over again. “We used to call him names because he got on our nerves,” David says. “And he was racist. All the things that we weren’t.”

  The Nutters on vacation in Broadstairs, Kent.

  * * *

  Though Christopher struggled to make any headway in toughening up his sons, there was always the hope the school system could do the job for him. By the time the boys came of age, the Education Act of 1944 had divided secondary schools into three distinct types and implemented an exam known as the Eleven-Plus to sort students among them. Doing well in the Eleven-Plus would grant a child access to one of the country’s coveted grammar schools, which opened a pathway to university and white-collar comfort. Doing poorly, on the other hand, diverted a child to a technical school, or one of the secondary moderns, which were looked upon by some with a dread bordering on horror. Capturing a widely shared opinion, the journalist Peter Laurie once wrote, “To have been consigned to the limbo of the secondary modern is to have failed disastrously, and very early in life.” Keith Richards summed up the secondary modern as “the school for kids that don’t stand much of a chance of doing anything except unskilled or semiskilled labor.” Simon Doonan, the writer and window-dresser, is even more blunt: “If, like me, you failed your Eleven-Plus, you were left with this horrible sinking feeling that society had essentially written you off already.”

  David failed the Eleven-Plus.

  Three years later, Tommy also failed—“desperately”—joining the other 75 to 80 percent of students who did the same.

  Prospects for escaping the working class now looked dim for both of them. David was given a reprieve, however, when Christopher and Dolly decided to send him to a private preparatory school instead. This was followed by Clark’s College, a secretarial school, where the Dickensian-named Mr. Savage would hold communal canings like public executions.

  Following in David’s wake, Tommy received no such boost. “My parents put me on to a council school, which was very rough,” he later recalled. “Rough” to Tommy was, in fact, a horticultural school, Camrose Secondary Modern, where students were taught how to grow vegetables and could elect to join the pig club.

  Camrose Secondary Modern was not to Tommy’s taste.

  In 1956, Tommy got another chance to safeguard his future, this one called the Thirteen-Plus. Doing well this time around would allow him to transfer to a building school, an engineering school, or even an art school, once vividly described by George Melly as a refuge for “the bright but the unacademic, the talented, the non-conformist, the lazy, the inventive and the indecisive”—essentially, a character sketch of T. A. Nutter. Over the 1950s and ’60s, art schools would develop into bastions of fashion and modernist jazz, Sartre and duffel coats, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. All of the imaginative people seemed to be art students, and Tommy was desperate to join the party; indeed, when he passed the Thirteen-Plus—“to everybody’s amazement”—art school was his first and only choice.

  However, as Tommy later acknowledged, “Art in those days was looked upon as a bit odd, a little bit funny, the Beatniks, all that sort of thing.” Christopher believed his sons were already funny enough. “My parents, bless them, just wouldn’t allow me to go to art school,” Tommy recalled. “They didn’t know what ‘art’ was.”

  At Christopher’s behest, Tommy was shunted instead into Willesden Technical College. There, he was condemned to a three-year building trade course that covered the rudiments of plumbing and bricklaying—or, as Tommy preferred to put it, “all those butch things I couldn’t bear.”

  * * *

  In part to inoculate themselves against the unbearable expectations of their father, Tommy and David combined their powers of invention. They treated the walls of their shared bedroom with shocks of colored paint. They built a faux fireplace from scavenged bricks and sculptures out of tin film containers threaded with wire. They sliced out pages from Marie Claire, Paris Match, and made a giant photo mural that juxtaposed Brigitte Bardot with African tribal dancers. They collected the entire back catalogue of Leonard Bernstein, which they blared on a portable radiogram.

  One of David’s early multiple exposure experiments.

  David also took up amateur photography.

  While stationed in Norway, Christopher had developed a taste for taking pictures, a taste he’d then passed on to his firstborn son (one of the few things they had in common). Christopher was content to just take snaps on summer vacation, but David was more inclined to pursue such hobbies to their creative extremes. In Edgware, he converted a closet into a makeshift darkroom, filling the tiny space with sloshing liquids, strips of film, and a cheap enlarger he could use to make experimental exposures. Over time, with the help of Tommy, who performed the role of artist’s muse, his work became increasingly sophisticated—and glamorous.

  Tommy, taking inspiration from the classic Hollywood portraits of George Hurrell.

  “Glamour,” today, is most often used as a synonym for beauty or celebrity, but it also has another meaning. As the writer Virginia Postrel has argued, glamour has to do with illusion—an illusion that masks certain details of reality and arouses longing for something better: “It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.” Glamour is part performance, part seduction. For Tommy and David, it also became a guiding life principle.

  Perhaps the starkest exposition of glamour is the modern American musical, where messy lives are streamlined through the grace of staging, and where inarticulable emotions are effortlessly expressed through a medium of song and dance. Unsurprisingly, young Tommy and David were musical “groupies” (as David describes it), catching the train down to the West End for standing-room tickets in the big theaters. It began with Guys and Dolls in the mid-1950s. My Fair Lady opened in 1958. Candide in 1959. Bye Bye Birdie would premiere in 1961. But their abiding favorite was—and remained, for much of their lives—West Side Story, which felt transgressive and tru
e, somehow, though they struggled to put their finger on exactly what spoke to them.

  Making the matinee at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

  Tommy and David framed a picture of Chita Rivera in their bedroom. When they received word that George Chakiris was playing tennis near their house, they stalked him like paparazzi. Between the two of them, they saw West Side Story at least a dozen times, over and over, Tommy even skipping classes to make the matinees at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

  * * *

  Tommy finally escaped Willesden Technical College in the summer of 1959 with a Pass standard in English language and geometrical drawing—which qualified him for almost nothing. His teachers and parents despaired of his ever landing “a decent job.”

  Now sixteen years old, Tommy had just missed conscription under the National Service Act, which was finally ending. Just the previous December, David had stood before a medical board in Acton and been rejected for his asthma. (“And I don’t think my eyesight was that good either,” David recalls with relief. “It would have finished me off, you know, because I don’t like being told what to do by anyone.”)

  Tommy got piecemeal employment at a variety of places, including a plumbing firm that forced him to transport ceramic toilet bowls on the Tube: “It really wasn’t me,” he later said. And then Christopher interceded once more on his son’s behalf. “My parents, thinking of a nice, safe job for their little boy, suggested I take the Civil Service exams,” Tommy recalled. A government position would mean a respectable, dependable career for life. He took the exams in October 1959.